Ethan Smith Q&A On How Using Subdomains Impacts SEO

6 Dec 2024 · 2 min

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1:39

Ethan Smith explains why subdomains hurt SEO: Google doesn't share domain authority across them. Moving from a subdomain to a subdirectory can triple or quadruple traffic. The switch usually takes a few hours using a reverse-proxy setup, and automatically unifies your analytics.

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And I asked a question that a founder wanted me to ask in advance, and it was around using platforms such as Webflow. You mentioned for marketing pages and for blogs and so forth, and also using it on a subdomain. So, do you, I guess, does using a platform such as Webflow on a subdomain significantly impact SEO? And then the second part to that they actually wanted me to ask was related to it. How do you unify analytics and tracking when using a subdomain?
My short answer is never use subdomains. For whatever reason, Google does not share authority on subdomains like it does if it's on the root directory subdirectory. Why? There's no good reason why, but that's how the algorithm works. So just never use subdomains. It'll slow you down and you won't reach full potential. And I've seen this multiple times where we'll start up in a subdomain, traffic will be low, It'll take a really long time, and then you change it to the subdirectory and it triples or quadruples. So the impact is substantial. And it's actually not that hard most of the time to do a subdirectory. So for Webflow, you can just do a reverse proxy and make it into a subdirectory. If you have your main web app and then Webflow, and that's in React, and then your Webflow is over here on a subdomain, you can just make it into a reverse proxy. And you can add any Webflow instance to any site and have it be a subdirectory. So just never do subdomains. And the scope is not high. The scope is like 3 hours or a day. It's, it's, it should not be that big of a deal. And then tracking and analytics is solved for you.